 My name is Walter Monk, M-U-N-K, and I'm a professor of oceanography at Scripps and have been here since for over 70 years. I have a special chair endowed by the Secretary of the Navy and have held that chair for about 30 years. And the first Allied initiative in fighting back was to be a amphibious landing in Northwest Africa. And I was working in the Pentagon and learned about practice landings in Carolina being carried out with new kinds of landing craft named LCBPs, Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel, boats that would come into the beach and then drop the bow and people would run out of the bow onto the beach and establish a beach head and learned and found that when the waves exceeded five feet height that the landing craft would broach, turn parallel to the beach, waves would break into the landing craft. People would get hurt and exercise would be secured waiting for a day with calmer conditions and I went back to find out about typical wave heights in Northwest Africa in winter and found they exceeded six feet and I wondered what would happen if under those conditions and I asked my commanding officer about that and he told me to just forget about it because he was sure that the authorities had considered that and I should do what I was told. I was 25 and I had no reputation and no background, very junior but I couldn't quite forget about it so I telephoned Harold Sverduk, whom I had met for two summers who had become my teacher and begged him to come out and he very kindly took the next flight and we sat together for about a month in the Pentagon to try and figure out how we could predict waves so one could pick a relatively calm day for the exercise it seemed like the only possible solution and after a month we were satisfied that this could be done and Harold Sverduk had a major reputation in the world they listened to him and we were permitted to participate in the planning and to predict the waves at the landing beaches and to pick a relatively calm two days and the landings took place under relatively good conditions